The smash-up of life and how I (don't really) deal with it

I find life very discombobulating.

discombobulate: verb, to disconcert or confuse.

On the one hand I spend time and energy organising a Bush Dance as a fundraiser for our local preschool. I worry about what kind of music to get, whether the band will be good enough and will we have enough prizes for the chocolate wheel.

I dress up like this. Yeah, I know. The glasses are definitely a mistake.

At the same time I carry around a continual sadness for people caught in slavery, indentured labour and violent relationships. I feel deeply the global injustices perpetrated against girls and women, the taking away of their voice and the lack of options.

On the one hand I write fiction for teeny-bop girls and get all excited because I might, maybe win a contest.

On the other hand, a vast majority of the population can't read because they're caught in poverty or war or a culture which says 'no'.

My discombobulation has been a lifetime thing. It comes from growing up as a rich westerner in a poor East Asian country, fending off beggars on a daily basis and driving past slum settlements on the way to school.

When I left Pakistan at the age of 16 I decided I would always be aware of life there.Never forget what it's like. Never give in to Western materialism.

But it's not that easy.

Sometimes the only way I can turn up to a fundraising bush dance with plastic golden sunglasses on my face is to temporarily forget that injustice exists, that people are suffering,

Apart from temporarily compartmentalising, putting different parts of life into different boxes, and then here and there bathing in sorrow from despair, I don't know how to manage this smashing together of pleasure and pain, all in one world, all in the same life.